Making extensions compatible in Firefox 3
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Life isn’t all that easy when you have updates and upgrades available at such rapid pace as Mozilla Firefox project. With an upgrade usually the framework is so much modified that your current Firefox extensions don’t work with the Alpha or Beta release. Now if you have an intermittent problem of testing newer non-stable versions of softwares then you miss out on the extensibility feature.
For example, there are very few extensions of Firefox 2.0.* which are compatible with Firefox 3 Beta. Hold on please, there is a tweak to get all your extensions (With exception of a few like Google Toolbar for Firefox crashes) working with Firefox 3 beta release. From what I have experienced the so called and much awaited FF 3 has some cool features. I have not played around with it much, but the first problem that I faced was to get all my extensions working with this new release. Here’s what you have to do to get all your extensions working. I must caution you though that there could be extensions that might make your Firefox unstable and make it crash. From what I have read All-in-one gestures when used with this tweak makes it crash for the first time. Also, this can cause some security glitch as well. So please use it at your own risk. Following are the steps:
- In a new tab type about:config. You get a beautiful (and funny) window which looks like this.
You know which button to hit. - Once you reach the about:config page look for an entry named extensions.checkCompatibility. If you see the entry then change the value to false.
- However, if you did not find an entry, then right click any where on the page and under new select boolean. Set it’s value to false. That’s all.
- Now you should have an entry that looks like this
- Close Firefox and restart. See the magic, all your old extensions are now working and are visible.
You see a warning message marked with an arrow like the following:
Help yourself with further experimentation. And remember it’s a tweak that means it’s not suppose to be tweaked to avoid any glitches. I am sure with the final release all the extensions will be compatible. There is another way as well to make extensions compatible, but for that you have to make code level changes and I am not discussing them. Let me know if someone wants to do it that way.
WordPress 2.5-Step-by-Step upgrade Guide for Beginners
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As many of you would know that, WordPress 2.5 RC 2 beta is released. I am not sure how many of you have upgraded. This post is not for the people who have already upgraded and have been playing around with this baby for sometime. So if you happen to be one of them, you can stop reading at your own discretion. However, the purpose of this post is to get the newbies and the non-geeks to upgrade to the new release.
Step 1: Backing up your old wordpress
If you are wondering that the step one is download the latest beta release and to upload it, then I am afraid my friends you’d making one of the biggest mistake called as ignorance. Unless, you feel ignorance is a bliss to you, you can do it (upload). But if you don’t want to screw up, then for every upgrade, the first step is backup my dear friends. Backing up your wordpress is a great idea before any upgrade, whether it is for a stable release or it is for a beta release. You can do it pretty easily by looking for the steps to backup on Google, or you can use my favorite backup plugin WP-DBManager. Follow the installation guide.
Once you have backed up your wordpress, you can move to the next step.
Step 2: Installing the latest wordpress (wordpress 2.5 RC 2)
The next step in the process is to download the beta release. Once you have downloaded the zip/tar.gz file, extract it and save it on some location of your hard disk. What you have to do next is to just upload the content of the wordpress folder to your website host using FTP. During upload your FTP client will prompt you that the files already exist. It’s safe to say overwrite all. Safe because, your old files and folders will stay intact and only the native (old) wordpress files will be over written. Patience is the virtue at this point as it might take sometime to upload the new files using FTP client.
Step 3: Updating the database tables to meet the requirements of wordpress 2.5
Once you have successfully uploaded all the files, the next step is to get indulged. Log into your admin area and the first thing that you see is not the page that asks for user name and password. The first page asks you to update the database.
It is self explanatory, so just hit the link update database. After the database is successfully updated, you’ll see a page that has a link which says continue. Just hit continue. You’ll redirected to the admin login page. Use your login and you are in.
5 Tips if you are starting a blog – A step-by-step guide
As I’ve settled a little with my blog. I am taking this opportunity to help the newbies with setting up their own wordpress blog. Following 5 tips which are in the format of a step-by-step guide would make it easy for people to set up their blog.
1) The first and most important tip is to get your own website and avoid blogging with blogging services like wordpress and blogger. What I mean by that is, you need to have your own website like digitally yours one and not something like http://xyz123.blogspot.com or http://xyz123.wordpress.com.
However, it is not mandatory that you have your blog hosted on a TLD (top level domain). What I mean is it’s not cumpolsory to have http://digitallife.co.in, you can have the website and host your blog on a sub domain like http://blog.digitallife.com or as a directory like http://digitallife.co.in/blog/. What’s important is that you are the owner of the TLD i.e. http://digitallife.co.in in this case.
2) If you are a hardcore programmer, please use your own ways of creating your blog. If you are novice, the best option you have is to install the latest version of wordpress (I personally feel that wordpress is the best blogging platform). You can download the latest copy (2.3.3) from here. Please avoid beta releases if you are not an expert. There is a famous five minute installation of wordpress here.
3) WordPress is such a versatile tool that it gives you enormous power and with power comes responsibility. The responsibility of not screwing up. So to avoid any screw up of your wordpress on your server, I suggest you to make a replica of you wordpress and run it on your localhost. For this you’ll need:
- A WAMP (WAMP is an acronym that stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or Perl or Python)). I use Vertrigo which can be found here. I will do an exhaustive post on the basic setup of wordpress on localhost using Vertrigo.
- After you have installed the WAMP, you can installed the wordpress (2.3.3) that you’ve downloaded. Start playing with installing themes and plugins as per the requirement of your blog. I’ll do a post on my favorite themes and plugins which I am using.
4) The next step is to ensure that your blog is seo optimized. Again, for this there are multiple plugins that you can find by visiting plugins section. Also, ensure that the URL of your post is not dynamic. What I mean by this, by default wordpress generates dynamic URLs for the posts that you publish. Something like this http://digitallife.co.in/?p=19. Instead your URL should be http://digitallife.co.in/highest-traffic-keyword-on-internet/.
This can be easily changed by customizing permalinks under the options section in your wordpress. Following snapshots will help you get a clear picture.
5) The last and most important thing is to take a regular backup of your blog. You must be asking me, how do I do that? It’s pretty simple, just use the plugin named WP-DBManager. I’ll do another post giving a complete tutorial on the usage and functionality of this plugin.
I hope, this post will be of some use to all the people planning to start their blog. These are just few tips when you are planning to start a blog. I’ll use another post with pictorial diagrams to tell you how to install wordpress on your hosting server.